More Every Day Annoyances, Please

All this over a parking spot... and I approve Photo Credit: WWE.com

Remember when Chris Jericho and Kane started a feud over a cup of spilled coffee? It's been a running joke for years, man, almost a decade even. I'm going to let you in on a little secret. I've always liked that moment, to be bluntly honest. I don't believe in the term "guilty pleasure," but if I were to have one, that moment in wrestling history would come closest to being called one.

There was a similar moment Friday on Smackdown, when the Fiat being driven by Hornswoggle and containing Nattie Neidhart and the Great Khali, was about to pull into a parking spot until Rosa Mendes, porting the Colon Cousins, snaked the spot right from under them at the last minute. Normally, a mixed-trios match featuring Nattie and the Freakshow against PERM wouldn't pique my interest, but I was actually invested in that match. I mean, who among us hasn't had a parking spot taken from us at the last minute by a sneaky motorist? Hell, how many times have we been on the stealing end and had someone curse us out? How many times was there a stated or implicit desire to engage in fisticuffs over said transgression?

We can't start a fight over that sort of thing. It sucks, but as law-abiding members of society, we kinda have to keep from resorting to violence in those situations. Pro wrestlers, well, they have legal avenues where they can remedy issues of social conflict through engaging in combat. It's almost like wrestling from the start was built up as a vicarious means of catharsis for regular joes like you and me. Weird.

The whole competition and winning Championships thing in wrestling has worked for decades, because it's an easy storytelling mechanism. However, every wrestling story at its heart should drive towards giving the crowd catharsis. Who said it had to be through means that are totally achieved strictly within the ethos of that environment? I don't think I want to see WWE become every-day-conflicts-resolved-by-physical-violence, but that's only because variety is the spice of life. I want every kind of story to be told, and hey, if those stories happen to come from coffee being spilled accidentally to snaking a parking spot and everything in between.

It especially works for people on the entry level or in the low-card. They literally have nothing to fight for. They're not getting title shots, and fuck if the main event guys deign to even talk to them. Hell, it was a minor miracle that John Cena even remembered who the fucking Prime Time Players were let alone work an opening-show angle with them before Mania. Why not let them run with a kangaroo court oeuvre where the heels break societal norms, and the faces make the challenges? I can't speak for anyone else, but I do know that an average Justin Gabriel vs. JTG match plunked in the middle of Smackdown would be baffling, but if it came of the result of JTG talking loud on his cellphone while Gabriel was meditating or reading, I'd be all over it.

So yeah, while I don't expect the spilled coffee or even the Smackdown thing to be more than jokes, I appreciate what the intent was with them. Wrestling is catharsis, whether it's a hero of the fans completing his run to the title, or whether it's someone actually getting to slap the shit out of the guy who stole his parking spot.